


You Mean More to Me Than You Know.

by theatergirl06



Series: Quarantine Nightmares [3]
Category: Six - Marlow/Moss
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:49:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23405569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theatergirl06/pseuds/theatergirl06
Summary: Though the queens are more than used to nightmares by now, there are some nightmares they can never be used to. By night three of the stay-at-home order, the screams in the night are coming from a more...unusual place, and one Catherine of Aragon is the only one who hears.
Relationships: Catherine of Aragon & Catherine Parr
Series: Quarantine Nightmares [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1682281
Comments: 4
Kudos: 95





	You Mean More to Me Than You Know.

By the third night of the stay-at-home order, things in the queens’ apartment had begun to change. These changes were small in some ways, fundamental in others. For instance, after two nights in a row of staying up and serving tea, Jane Seymour, despite what she claimed, was too tired to cook both breakfast and lunch. On the third day, she could be found sitting in the window with her book, a murder mystery set in Paris, as Catherine of Aragon performed Jane’s usual task of cooking. That was a change that mattered, but in itself was small and temporary.

Then there were the changes that really didn’t matter at all. The fact that Anne, Anna, and Kat tried out power yoga that morning, Katherine only having agreed to do so as part of a deal she and Anna had made the day before. These changes made no impact on the lives of the other queens, but it was odd to see the beheaded cousins on a yoga mat instead of causing mischief.

Then there were the changes that were nice. The fact that Cathy Parr, who had spent most of the quarantine cooped up in her room with her laptop, had come out that day for the longest time yet, passing through to have a book discussion with Jane, and popping into the kitchen to help Catherine with lunch before retreating back to her room, where she stayed until she heard Anne yelling up the stairs that it was time for dinner. 

Then there were the changes that none of the queens could ignore. 

Screams in the night and midnight chats in the kitchen were a normality in the queens’ apartment, but even within that, there were normal normalities and normalities that were...not so normal. In other words, there were the queens who would scream in the night constantly (like Anne and Kat), and there were the ones who would scream...not quite as much.

On the third night of the stay-at-home order, Catherine of Aragon was woken up by the shrill sounds of screams echoing through the apartment. 

_ Really?  _ she thought to herself.  _ First it’s Anne and then it was Kat and Jane running down the hall and now this. When do I get to sleep?  _ But despite her slightly bad mood, when she didn’t hear Jane’s footsteps at all, she took it upon herself to check on whoever had been screaming. She didn’t bother waking Jane as she began the journey upstairs. Even if she had been the one who screamed, the blonde queen was too exhausted to have woken up, and she’d have forgotten the dream by morning. Grumbling in exhaustion, Catherine reluctantly climbed the last two steps.

And froze.

She had expected Anne or Kitty to be the one who had screamed, and of course she didn’t mind helping them, but still, she’d expected it. It was part of her routine, and as such, at those times when she didn’t want to do it for whatever reason, it became a chore. 

What she hadn’t expected was to hear sobbing coming from the room of one Catherine Parr. Truthfully, she had thought the sixth queen would have been awake at this hour (it was around 12:30), and wouldn’t have had a nightmare to scream at. But no matter the surprise of it, Catherine was certainly not going to walk away from her clearly upset goddaughter.

She knocked softly on the door. “Cathy, love? It’s me.” Silence. “Can I come in?” 

Hearing silence again, Catherine decided to take a leap of faith and enter the room anyway. She found Cathy sitting at her desk, head in her arms and undeniably crying. Her entire body seemed limp, as though if someone took the desk away, she would have completely collapsed and folded over. 

She looked, in short, weaker than Catherine had ever seen her. And that worried the Spanish queen a lot. 

Had the quarantine taken a bigger toll on her goddaughter than any of them had noticed?

It would have been easy for her to hide it. She  _ was  _ in her room all the time. 

But wondering why she was in distress was not what Catherine had come there to do. She had come to help Cathy. And that was what she was going to do. 

Slowly and gently, she lifted the sixth queen off of the chair, helped get her out of her rumpled flannel and into her soft pajamas, and laid her softly in the bed. But the second she touched the sheets, Cathy began thrashing and yelling, until Catherine lifted her back into the air and she went limp again. Catherine knew the woman needed sleep, so she tried the next-best thing. She scooped her completely up in her arms (the woman was tiny compared to Catherine, so it was very easy), and carried her down the stairs to her own room. When she placed her down on the bed, instead of thrashing, Cathy seemed to relax even more, sinking into the soft mattress and exhaling for the first time since Catherine had opened her door. Gently, Catherine tucked the blankets in around her and sat on the edge of the bed. The final wife still had tears streaming down her face, but Catherine knew she would talk when she was ready. 

As she stroked the 25 year old’s hair, Catherine was surprised at the rush of emotion she felt. Cathy was her goddaughter, and they’d always had a bond, but it had always been more of the ranting to one another when they were mad, sharing intellectual conversation, and hiding from their problems in each other’s rooms type of bond. It had never been the kind of bond Jane had with Kat, the kind with cuddles and sharing feelings and late night gossip sessions. She hadn’t taken care of someone like this since...well, since Mary. And she was surprised at how easily it came to her with Cathy. How right it felt. 

At last, Cathy lifted her hands away from her face and stared up at Catherine with a look in her eyes similar to that of a young deer looking at the world for the first time. When she spoke, her voice shook, as though it was about to break at any moment. 

“Thank you.”

Catherine found she didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t Jane or Kat, she wasn’t good at dealing with nightmares and tears. “There’s, uh, no need to thank me. I was only doing what was right.” 

Cathy shook her head. “What was right was giving me a pillow. You gave me pajamas, arms to rest in, and your room.” 

Catherine smiled softly, secretly glad her goddaughter thought so highly of her. “Well, now you can repay me by telling me what happened. It’ll help you, too.”

Cathy sighed, propping her head up on Catherine’s pillows. “I had...a nightmare. A really bad one. It wasn’t about the time I got abducted by extremists, or about the time I almost got beheaded, or about my survivor’s guilt, or about Mae. Those are rare, but I’ve had them all more than once. This...this was one I’ve never had before.” Cathy looked up and stared straight into her godmother’s eyes. “This was about my mother.” 

Catherine breathed a long sigh as she felt all the air leak out of her. Cathy’s mother. Her lady-in-waiting. The one who had been so eerily similar to her that it scared her. It was one of the reasons she and Cathy were so alike. 

Maud. 

Cathy sighed, and Catherine realized that she was squeezing her hand.

“My mother died when I was nineteen, but growing up, she and I were very close. She was my inspiration, my role model, in my mind, if I turned out like her, that was the best thing I could possibly be. My mother was everything to me. Absolutely everything.” She took a deep breath and kept talking, tears beginning to stream out of her eyes again. “She started becoming weaker around the same time you were…” Cathy’s voice trailed off.

Catherine laughed, a rare sound from her. “Around the time I was heading toward divorce town?”

Cathy giggled, also a rare sound for the Protestant queen. “Yes, around then. Anyway, she never lived to see Henry marry everyone after you. But she was completely devoted and loyal to you. She always said how wrong it was that Henry was trying to end your marriage. Anyway...I believed that, too. Throughout the next four wives, I kept rolling my eyes. I always thought how horrible he was to run through women like that, to keep dishonoring his marriage with you, over and over again.” 

Catherine thought she might know what was coming next. “But?”

Cathy sighed. “But when it was my turn, well...you know, I had no choice. All I was trying to do was survive. But I never stopped feeling like I was going against everything my mother believed. I went to the grave believing that I had failed her. And even though when I came back, I learned a lot about myself and gained a lot of confidence, I never really stopped believing that. And tonight…” Cathy’s gaze, which had begun to wander, snapped back until she was gazing right into the center of her godmother’s eyes. “Tonight, I fell asleep while writing at my desk. And when I woke up, her corpse was sitting on my bed. She yelled and yelled at me about how wrong I had been, how much I’d disappointed her, how she wished she’d never had a daughter, how she preferred that to having me. I covered my ears, but her yells kept boring into my brain, and eventually that was just all I could focus on. I don’t know how long it lasted or when I screamed, but when you put me on the bed back up there, it...it was right on top of her.” Her breathing grew faster and then slower again. “When you brought me down here, it...it was the first time she’d gone quiet.” Cathy looked up into the Spanish queen’s eyes. For someone only 5 years her junior, Catherine couldn’t get over how young she looked at this moment.    
“Even though the actual nightmare is over, I still can’t shake the feeling that if my mother knew everything, she’d...she’d hate me!” Cathy’s voice trailed off at the end of her sentence as she began to cry again. 

“Catherine Parr, that is the last time you’re going to cry tonight.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to tell you something, and I don’t want you to forget it.” 

“And what might that be?”

“Cathy, if your mother knew everything, she would be incredibly proud of you.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because your mother and I are a lot alike, Cath. Eerily so. And  _ I  _ am incredibly proud of you.”

Cathy stared at the first queen. “Do you really mean that?”

“I’m many things, Catherine Parr, but I’m not a liar.” 

Cathy smiled and laid her head back onto the pillows, looking fully at ease for the first time that night. “Would it be okay if I stayed here tonight? I know we’re not Jane and Kat, but…”

Catherine did something she did very often, though not usually with her goddaughter. She interrupted. “Of course you can.” 

As Catherine left the room to make sure Cathy hadn’t left her laptop open, she heard the writer’s soft voice coming from behind her. “One more question?”

Catherine laughed. “Are you never not asking questions?”

“Why did you help me? Why did you give me your room and listen to me and make me feel better?” 

Catherine turned and looked at Cathy. Her face was illuminated with moonlight coming through her bedroom window. 

Catherine decided that the laptop could wait. She closed the door, crawled back into bed, and put her arms around she last queen. 

“Because, Cathy...you’re my daughter.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I had to do a little research for this one, which made me feel really professional. Hope you enjoyed it!


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